Engineering ammo changes

A Blizzard developer mentioned recently that he thought that hunter ammo expenses were too high and they wanted to change that. After some reader responses and a few calculations, I found that hunters do indeed spend a lot of gold on crafted ammunition. The costs are so high that one of our guild hunters (read his blog here) recently said that he has stopped using crafted ammo all together and that he’s still doing exceptional DPS. Well now we know that Blizzard is going to go forward with their ammo changes. Here’s the breakdown:

Currently, engineers create ammo crates which hold 10 charges of 200 pieces of ammo. Each crate = 2000 shots and at 20 gold per stack of saronite and cobalt ore, cost roughly 30 gold per crate for saronite razorheads and about 21 gold per crate for mammoth cutters.

The change for patch 3.2 is that engineers will no longer create crates but stacks of 1000 arrows/bullets. The materials cost for 2000 razorheads is now 4 saronite bars. For 2000 mammoth cutters it’s 2 saronite bars and 3 cobalt bars + 1 crystallized water. The materials cost for 2000 razorheads @20 gold/stack of ore should be ~ 8 gold. The materials cost for 2000 mammoth cutters should be ~ 7 gold. That works out to be a materials cost of about 25% of the previous cost.

I don’t know what to think of the change. I don’t sell a lot of ammo crates because there is more competition and it seems fewer buyers. Lately with school being out, it seems there are a lot more buyers for my ammo stacks. I guess more casual players are picking up the game again for the summer. What does this have to do with anything? Well, ammo crates are going to go away for good. All crafted ammo will now be sold as stacks of ammo. This is good and bad for me. It’s good because it means more customers, it’s bad because it means more competition. Since the price of materials is going down by 75% it also means more room to undercut. It’ll be interesting to see how much ammo goes for after the patch. On Bleeding Hollow, the price of a stack of 1000 has stabilized to about 35-37 gold. Will we see prices drop by half? What will the competition be like? Ammo sales are my primary source of income, so I am a bit concerned.